CWA District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor discusses the successful strike at Verizon and Verizon Wireless and reviews the CWA District 1 Verizon and Verizon Wireless New York/New England Tentative Agreement.

The unity and determination of our members for 6 ½ weeks on the street—in the great tradition of 1971 and 1989—proved that management was wrong. Our members stood up and fought back, and turned back virtually every concession that remained on the table when we went on strike on April 13th.

Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers who have been on strike since April 13 are celebrating big gains after coming to an agreement in principle with the company. After 45 days of the largest strike in recent history, striking CWA members have achieved our major goals of improving working families’ standard of living, creating good union jobs in our communities and achieving a first contract for wireless retail store workers.

Over the course of a four-day visit to the Philippines this week, four representatives of Communications Workers of America who are on strike discovered that the extent to which Verizon is offshoring work is far beyond what has previously been reported and what the company publicly has claimed. Verizon is offshoring customer service calls to numerous call centers in the Philippines, where workers are paid just $1.78 an hour and forced to work overtime without compensation.

Following our meeting with Verizon on Monday, the CWA District 1/IBEW Local 2213 and IBEW New England Regional Committees met with the Company in off record discussions over call sharing, The union committee continued to meet throughout the week to discuss our next steps.

Days before Verizon?s annual shareholder meeting, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) announced today that Verizon workers, who also hold an estimated $1.3 billion in the company?s stock, will vote for a series of shareholder proposals to improve the company?s corporate governance. Verizon workers, who have been on strike since April 13, are saying the company?s short-sighted decision-making is hurting Verizon?s shareholders, customers and long-term viability.

Your Bargaining Team met with the company in Rye this afternoon for approximately 2 1/2 hours. We made some compromise proposals in a number of areas, designed to kick-start the bargaining process. One of these proposals included a plan that would give the company greater flexibility in routing customer service calls, while at the same time limiting the amount of contracting out of that work overall.

Today, Verizon presented what it described as its ?last, best, and final offer? to your bargaining teams in Philadelphia and Westchester. Unfortunately, their ?last and best? was little more than the ?same old bullshit.?

After trying for ten months to reach a fair contract, nearly 40,000 Verizon workers from Massachusetts to Virginia will go on strike at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, April 13 if a fair agreement is not reached by then. The Verizon strike will be by far the largest work stoppage in the country in recent years.

Yesterday the Company gave us a proposal that contained no movement from their previous proposal to address our critical needs. There was no movement in wages, it continues to freeze pensions at 30 years and still allows them to increase contracting and off-shoring of our work.